


L'avenir

by fraternite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Canon Era, Canonical Character Death, Gen, but with minor fantasy elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-02-04 17:41:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1787536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean Prouvaire and Bahorel, in parallel, encounter revolution and death.  A story about leaving in the middle of stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	L'avenir

**Author's Note:**

> There is also a podfic version: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1795462

 

Prouvaire didn't remember much from 1820. He'd been a child at the time, just past his eleventh birthday. He remembered shouting in the streets, adults talking in urgent whispers, torches flickering outside a window as he was hurried away from it and sent up to bed. For a week, the family didn't go out; Jean was kept in his bedroom and his tutor heaped extra work upon him, and he would sit and translate the lives of the great statesmen of ages past from the Greek until a newspaper or an adult arrived with news of what was going on outside and the tutor got distracted. Then Jean would slip over to the window to look out through the blurry, rain-streaked glass at the streets and rooftops of his city. Nothing  _ looked _ different, but he could  _ feel _ the change. Something was waking up, growing, something big. It was scary--but fascinating at the same time.

One night, as his parents fought in the dining room over whose fault it was they hadn't gotten out before things went bad and whose idea it had been to move to the city in the first place, Jean heard noises in the street outside. Quietly, he slipped out of the room and went up to his bedroom to sit at the window.

There were people running down his street. Some carried torches, others guns or knives or hammers. High above the street, behind the thick glass of the window, Jean couldn't hear what they were shouting, but the tone of the muffled sound was angry and powerful. Some of the people were limping, or being helped along by others, and in the glare of the torchlight, Jean could see blood on clothes and faces.

He wondered what had happened, what all these people were running from--or to--and what had brought them out on the streets in the first place. His parents had been very careful, as always, to not let their son hear anything about the political troubles, but his tutor was less guarded when he was talking with one of the servants, and Jean knew that people were angry over something called the "Double Vote law," and that some number of people (reports varied from eight to a hundred) had been killed in the resulting riots.

These things must be terribly important to these people, Jean reasoned, if they were risking their lives just to express how angry they were over them, and he resolved to find out more later on, if he could. But for now, he just watched the stream of people--so many people--running past in the street below. And he wondered what it would feel like to be one of those men, so angry and so brave.

 

* * *

 

Bahorel, for his part, remembered 1820 far too well.

He'd been a first-year law student and a fourth-year rioter and disseminator of dangerous opinions, having applied himself to law in the hopes that a legal degree might accomplish what fists and fire could not. When the Double Vote law was proposed and the people turned out to protest it, Bahorel had a strong feeling that this time would be different--this time, something big would change. He was so giddy with anger and hope that he caught the attention of two other students in his building, Nicolas Lallemand and Gauvain Borel, who decided to accompany him to see the protests and smell the spirit of revolution in the air. When royal guards came to disperse the crowd, Nicolas was hit in the back by a bullet as they ran.

Thousands of people came to the funeral. Bahorel had never seen anything like it, and he was torn between guilt over his friend's death and anticipation of what would happen next. Standing for three hours in rain so heavy he could neither see nor hear what was going on, he had a good long think about the state of things.

That evening, Bahorel was in the front ranks of the crowd, shouting "Vive le chartre!" until his throat was raw. And when the dragoons brought out their swords, he was one of the first to be cut down.

_ Just a minute, and then I'll get back up, _ he thought in the first minutes of shock, as he lay there on the cobblestones, boots thundering past his head.  _ Just a minute to catch my breath. _ Then things started to go red and wavy on the edges, and the warm blood seeped out of his chest to mix with the rainwater, and he realized that he might not be able to get back up.

_ Not now, God damn it, _ he thought.  _ Not now, in the middle of everything. I have to see how it ends. _

 

* * *

 

They had only a few seconds’ warning. One moment it was a quiet, ordinary afternoon; the next, feet thundered up the stairs and Feuilly burst through the door, panting and dripping with sweat.

“ The gen--gendarmes,” he gasped. “They--heard a rumor--they--they’re downstairs.”

The room burst into frantic questions and exclamations, everyone on their feet and talking at once--except for Combeferre, who sat frozen at the table, staring down in horror at the drafts of seditious pamphlets spread out in front of him.

“ Burn them!” Courfeyrac said quickly, turning toward the empty fireplace and searching around for a tinderbox.

“ In July?” Bossuet exclaimed. “It’ll look too strange; they’ll know.”

“ Tear them up and throw them out the window,” Enjolras suggested.

"They’ll find them in the street,” Joly pointed out.

Raised voices were heard from the room below, and the first heavy treads sounded on the stairs.

“ Burn them and throw the ashes out the window,” Courfeyrac suggested desperately.

“ There’s no time--give them to me.” Bahorel was scooping them up off the table even as he said the words. As Joly and Bossuet set up an emergency game of dominoes and Courfeyrac snatched up a bottle and poured glasses of wine, Bahorel ran to the window and vaulted out onto the roof of the other section of the cafe.

Prouvaire watched, gaping, as the big man ran across the roof tiles as fearlessly as if they were the cobblestones of the street, three levels below. When he reached the edge of the cafe’s roof, he put on a burst of speed, then launched himself across the gap to the next roof. There was a heart-stopping wobble, then he was running steadily across the tiles. In the room behind him, Prouvaire could hear the others hurriedly assembling themselves in poses of casual innocence, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the running figure.

As he watched, Bahorel reached the edge of his roof. He took a great flying leap toward the next roof and made the edge, but then staggered. He teetered for a moment, arms flailing. Then he plummeted into the alley.

Prouvaire gasped and gripped the windowsill.

Combeferre’s hand was on his elbow. “Prouvaire,” he muttered warningly.

“ Ferre . . . he--”

“ I know,” Combeferre said in a quiet, urgent tone. “But for the next ten minutes, you and I are going to calmly stand here and pretend we’ve been having a conversation about Dante. Because anything else we do will doom all of us as well as him.”

The door swung open and an officer strode in, the look of triumph on his face faltering and turning to frustration at the sight of a group of rich young students loafing away their afternoon over dice and cheap wine. Several other policemen crowded into the room behind him.

“ Afternoon, officers,” Grantaire slurred, leaning his chair back and waving a bottle in their direction. “Care to join us? The wine is--well, the wine is very bad, but the company--”

“ Is even worse,” Bossuet giggled, laying a domino with a wavery flourish and knocking three or four others off the table in the process.

“ I’ll have you know--” Grantaire began, but his energetic gestures threw off the delicate balance of his tipped-back chair, and he ended up on the floor with a thundering crash.

The officer stepped over him with the look of a lady picking her way through a barnyard, and peered into the fireplace. Beside him, Prouvaire felt Combeferre give the faintest sigh of relief at the danger averted.

“ Can we help you with anything?” Enjolras asked coldly, and Courfeyrac jumped in at his elbow.

“ Looking for a light for your pipe? I think Boss has a tinderbox.”

“ We are looking,” the officer said coldly, “for evidence of illegal activities.”

“ You’ll find nothing of the sort here, sir,” Combeferre said calmly. “Unless there’s been a law passed against medicine or poetry.”

“ Or against lawyers--what an irony that would be!” Courfeyrac laughed, and Prouvaire’s heart seized within him when Bahorel’s voice didn’t chime in with  _ They deserve no less--outlaw the whole pack of them! _ He twisted his handkerchief in his hands and forced himself to not imagine what they’d find lying in the alley two streets away.  _ Not now. Just get through this. It’s what he--it’s what he did it for. _

The gendarmes--prompted in part, perhaps, by the gleeful irreverence of the other students (and of course they were jubilant, Prouvaire reminded himself; they thought they’d just gotten away with a daring escape)--ended up searching everyone for suspicious papers. Fortunately, the most incriminating thing any of them had on them was a rather . . . detailed note from his mistress that Joly had tucked into the pocket of his waistcoat. After blustering about for a few more minutes, testing the floorboards and knocking on the walls in search of false panels, the gendarmes finally gave up.

Combeferre kept his stilling hand on Prouvaire’s arm. “Wait,” he said quietly, as the others stifled their laughter. He looked out the window to where the gendarmes were just exiting the cafe. Prouvaire could feel the tension through Combeferre’s hand as his eyes followed the men to the corner of the street and out of sight. His lips moved, silently counting as he calculated how far away they’d gotten. “All right, let’s go,” he said finally.

They left quickly, Combeferre whispering a quick word to Enjolras as he passed him and gathering Joly with a tug on his elbow. As the door closed behind them, Prouvaire heard confused questions in their wake, and the beginning of Enjolras’s explanation. But it was soon left behind as they hurried down the narrow stairs and out the back door of the cafe.

“ What’s going on?” Joly asked as they made their way through the crowded main street. “Where are we going?”

“ Bahorel fell,” Combeferre explained simply. Joly’s face drained of color, but he set his mouth in a firm grimace and pushed more determinedly through the knots of burly workmen and women with arms full of purchases.

But when they rounded the corner to the alley, they found Bahorel sitting on the edge of a wagon full of rags and other scraps, swinging his feet. He grinned broadly when he saw them.

“ It worked, then?”

“ God in heaven!” Combeferre exclaimed. He sagged against the alley wall. “I thought we were coming back here to scrape up your bones from the cobblestones.”

Joly, gaping, looked up at the rooftop, far overhead, then at Bahorel’s very-much-unbroken body. “Are you immortal?” he finally asked, in a tone that seemed only half joking.

Bahorel just smirked at him and raised an eyebrow.

“ We’re going to check you over anyway,” Combeferre said, straightening up. “Rag-and-bone cart or no, three stories is a long way to fall.” Bahorel grumbled good-naturedly, but stretched out his arms and legs for the bones to be felt, demonstrated the proper operation of all his joints, and allowed his eyes to be peered into. All the while, he was making faces at Prouvaire, who was still standing back at the entrance to the alley, feeling as though his own legs might collapse underneath him.

“ You’re absolutely fine,” Combeferre finally declared, in a voice of wonder. “I don’t know how, but you are. We’d better get back to the others; I told Enjolras what happened.”

“ They’re probably mourning your passing already,” Joly said, with another glance overhead. “Three stories, my god!”

“ It is extremely surprising, but not entirely unheard-of,” Combeferre mused. “I once read about a woman, out in the countryside, who fell off a castle battlement and walked away unharmed. And there was another case . . .”

Caught up in Combeferre’s catalog of unusual accidents, the medical students didn’t notice when the other two stayed behind in the alley--Prouvaire, because he didn’t think he could get his legs to move, and Bahorel because Prouvaire wasn’t moving.

“ All right?” he asked quietly, plucking at Prouvaire’s sleeve.

“ You could have died,” Prouvaire breathed. The knowledge of it, which he’d thought he’d grasped the moment he saw Bahorel topple from the roof, was only now really hitting him, closing like a vise around his chest. “You very nearly  _ did _ die.”

Bahorel shrugged. “But I didn’t.”

“ But you could have. And it could have been any of us.”

“ Well, I don’t know that anyone else would have been quite so stupid. Grantaire, maybe,” Bahorel joked, but then he matched his mood to Prouvaire’s. “But yes, there’s risk in this thing. If I hadn’t taken the pamphlets, the gendarmes might have arrested us, and we could have been executed. It’s something you have to be ready for, in a cause like this.

“ Or,” he continued. “Nothing might have happened, and we might have finished the meeting in peace and then been run over by an omnibus as we left the cafe. You never know, Prouvaire,  _ when _ you’re going to die. Only that it’ll happen one day.”

“ Yes, I suppose that’s so,” Prouvaire whispered.

“ Does that frighten you?”

“ I didn’t  _ think  _ so. Now I’m not so sure. Seeing you--thinking that you  _ had _ \--I feel more frightened than I’d counted on.” He looked down at his hands, still awkwardly twisting his handkerchief. “Maybe I’m not suited for this.”

Bahorel opened his mouth, stood like that for a long moment, then closed it again without saying anything. Then he clapped Prouvaire on the back. “You get used to it,” he assured him. “Come on, let’s get back to the others.”

Prouvaire allowed himself to be led back to the cafe, still wondering what it was that Bahorel had decided not to say to him.

 

* * *

 

Prouvaire’s eyes stung from the smoke and the throbbing of his head where he’d been hit with a musket. He closed them and leaned back against the wall, trying to find a way to turn his head so that the weight of it wasn’t resting on the lump the musket blow had raised. His arms, bound tightly behind his back, didn’t make it any easier. Finally, he settled for drawing up his knees to his chest and leaning his forehead on them.

They were going to kill him. He’d overheard the officers discussing whether executing him might break the spirit of the other revolutionaries--and even if they didn’t do it now, well, he’d been caught in an act of treason. One way or the other, he’d be dead in hours.

It was strange that it was all ending here, now. After all the months of preparation, it felt like they’d barely begun. He’d fought against the National Guard for perhaps ten minutes before being knocked half-unconscious and dragged away from the barricade. He wasn’t sure he’d even had the chance to shoot anyone.

As he often did when he found himself adrift and afraid, Prouvaire searched for a verse, an inspiring line of poetry to cling to. But his mind was a blank.

He lifted his head and looked around, searching for something to distract himself with. The guardsmen had settled down to wait, in the patient, indifferent attitude of soldiers, while their officers stood around a table, looking over maps and messages and debating their next move. Night was falling, and the soldiers had begun to light lamps, but the warm glow didn’t reach the alley where they’d dumped Prouvaire.

And then, in the dimness, he saw Bahorel walk out of a building at the end of the alley. Not out the door of a building, but through the wall itself. And there was something odd about how he looked, a slight difference in the way the light struck him, as if he wasn’t quite there at all. He shook himself, and his figure looked normal again--and Prouvaire understood.

So he wouldn’t be the first of their family to die, after all.

He dropped his eyes to the torn, dirty knees of his trousers, and waited to see what Bahorel would do. A minute later, he heard the scuff of boots on the pavement, and Bahorel slid down the wall to sit beside him.

“ So.”

“ So.”

“ Are you all right?”

Prouvaire managed a faint smile. “As much as can be hoped. How are the others?”

“ All right. Worried about you.” Bahorel’s forehead creased for a moment. “Mourning . . . those that died.”

“ Those that died?” Prouvaire sat up straighter. “Who?”

“ No one,” Bahorel said quickly. “That is, no one except--well. Perhaps now is the time to tell you: I’m . . . not exactly mortal--that is, I  _ am _ \-- _ was _ \--but I’ve already tangled with my mortality, and come out on the losing end.”

“ You’re a ghost.”

“ Yes.”

“ You’re the one they’re mourning.”

“ Yes.”

“ But you--” Prouvaire thought back to the day a few summers ago when Bahorel fell off the roof, and things suddenly became clearer. “It wasn’t just tonight--you have been for some time.”

“ Right again.” Bahorel peered over at Prouvaire’s face, frowning in disappointment. “What, no gasp of shock? No fainting? I’m hurt; this is a fantastic story!”

“ I’d already figured out something was odd,” Prouvaire told him. “I saw you walk through that building.”

“ Why didn’t you say anything?”

Prouvaire shrugged. “I figured I would let you tell me in your own time.”

Bahorel gaped at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. “You little . . . you are a rare creature, Jean Prouvaire.” He punched him fondly on the arm.

“ How did it happen?” Prouvaire asked after a minute.

“ It was in 1820,” Bahorel said. “You remember all that--the Lallemand Affair, the Double Vote law, all that? I was young and excited and stupid; when things got ugly, I didn’t run quick enough, and they got me. I was lying there in the middle of the riot, bleeding out on my own hands, and I remember being, more than anything, so  _ angry  _ that I would have to leave in the middle of everything--that I’d never find out what happened.”

Bahorel trailed off, staring down at his hands, remembering.

“ And then?” Prouvaire prompted.

He shrugged. “Things faded away for a minute, but then I was awake, I stood up, I started to follow the crowd. It wasn’t until I looked back and saw my body lying on the cobblestones that I realized. I didn’t know what else to do, so I went back to my lodgings, and my concierge didn’t seem to notice any difference, so I just went on with life as normal. I found out I couldn’t be hurt, and that if I wanted to I could go through things--but that generally made it harder to explain myself, so I mostly kept my appearance as normal as possible.” He laughed quietly. “I don’t understand any of it. I’ve had no explanation, and it didn’t feel like it was any kind of choice on my part. Perhaps heaven and hell both rejected me, and I’m trapped here forever.

“ But no,” he continued, slower. “I . . . I’ve had the feeling, many times, that I  _ could _ go on--to whatever is next--if I wanted to, that it might be just as easy as looking away from the world, from all the things holding my attention here. That all I'd have to do is  _ look up. _

“ But I’ve never wanted to look away. There’s always a story going on, and the story is never finished. When I died in 1820, I wanted to stay to see the action through to the finish, to see if we were able to stop the law. When that didn’t happen, I knew it was only a matter of time before someone tried again to change things, and I didn’t want to miss that. There was always another riot, another fight to join, another story to follow. I couldn't bring myself to leave any of them, even when I felt the most disconnected."

“ Then why did you leave this one?” Prouvaire asked.

“ I saw your face when they dragged you away." Bahorel looked at him earnestly. "And I remembered that time--with the pamphlets, when I fell off that roof. And I said to myself, ‘fuck it, he shouldn’t be alone.’ But the only way I could think of to get away was to play dead. So I let the next big fellow to come over the barricade stick me, and once they carried my body out to the alleyway, I got up and came to find you. I thought maybe it might make it easier,” he added, “to know that I’ve been through it already.”

Prouvaire nodded slowly. “Did it hurt--when you really died, I mean?”

“ Hurt like hell,” Bahorel affirmed. “But they ripped my chest open with sabers and left me to bleed out in the rain. A firing squad, that’s something else entirely. It should be clean and quick.”

“ I hope so. I . . .” his voice dropped to a whisper. “I think I can be brave enough, as long as . . . as long as it’s quick.”

“ I think you will be.” Bahorel put a heavy arm around Prouvaire’s shoulders. “I think you’re braver than you think you are.”

They sat in silence for a minute, watching the night deepen in the corners of the alleyway.

“ We’re--they’re--not going to win,” Prouvaire said quietly. “I heard the soldiers talking. The people haven’t risen up like we thought they would. There are only a few barricades; they’ll never make it.”

“ No, they won’t,” Bahorel agreed. “But others will come after them. There will always be another story. As soon as one ends, another one’s beginning.”

Sharp footsteps approached the alley, and Prouvaire looked up to see the officer of the guard standing before him, flanked by two guardsmen.

“ Get him up.”

They pulled Prouvaire up by his elbows--not seeming to notice Bahorel, who stepped aside to give them space--and stood him up against the wall. Four more guards came up, muskets ready.

“ Do you want a blindfold?” the officer asked Prouvaire. Swallowing hard, Prouvaire shook his head. The officer shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He turned to his men. “On my count.”

The night was very quiet, the air still and warm against Prouvaire’s skin, but the stones of the building behind him were cool. His legs, in spite of himself, trembled, and he struggled to keep it from showing.  _ Just a little longer,  _ he told himself.

Behind his back, Bahorel’s hand slipped into his--warm, rough, and heavy. Prouvaire clasped it tightly and raised his head.

“ _Vive la_ _ France!" _  he cried, and the sound of his voice in the night air, alive with his own warm breath, was a strange and beautiful thing.  _ “Vive l'avenir!” _

 

* * *

 

And Bahorel found himself alone, his hand empty. The smoke from the muskets cleared to show Prouvaire lying at his feet, his chest drenched in red, his dark eyes still open but seeing nothing. But it was just an empty shell, that was clear in an instant. Prouvaire himself--Bahorel was not at all surprised to see--had moved on immediately, ready to face whatever it was that came next.

The guardsmen went about cleaning and reloading their guns. Possibly some of those musket balls would kill more of Bahorel’s friends. Certainly something would, before the evening was out. Bahorel thought about slipping back through the buildings to return to the fight, to make an attempt to save even a few of his friends--these exciting, wonderful people who believed enough in the world and in people to believe they could be good. People like that were rare, should be preserved where possible.

And there was what happened next to think of. Even if they all died here, the nation’s injustices--and the people’s anger over them--would continue, and one day it was bound to boil over again. After enough cycles of trying and failing and trying again, surely one day enough people would move together that they could succeed and really change things. That would be a thing to see.

But something had changed. It had been changing, he realized, for years, as he watched story after story begin and end and new ones take their places--but the pieces had fallen into place as he’d talked with Prouvaire.

The story would never be finished. No matter what happened here, in the next few days, humanity would march on, and there would be victories and losses--and battles with no clear winner or loser--and all of it, in all its messy, complicated beauty, would go on forever and ever. It was all one story, and it would always be in the middle.

So maybe this was as good a time as any to leave it.

Bahorel stretched his arms over his head, cracked his knuckles. He looked around him, at the blood-soaked cobblestones, the flickering lamps of the guardsmen, the tall, solid buildings. From the direction of the barricade, a single shot was fired, and he wondered who had pulled the trigger on the spy, and what Combeferre had had to say about it. But it all seemed very far away. The world was fainter, growing crystalline at the edges, the way it did when his ties to it seemed to grow more fragile, when he had the feeling all it would take was just one look . . .

In the falling darkness, Bahorel gave a last salute in the direction of the barricade, and looked up.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to pilferingapples for betaing this for me and for all the enthusiastic cheering-on in general.


End file.
